Gig Day XI: Spring Jam V

23 May 202519 May 2025 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Tonight is the Spring Jam, one of the two recitals I host on my front porch every year (the other is the Spooktacular, which is in late October). I’m looking forward to an evening of music, merriment, and hot dogs.

This year marks the fifth Spring Jam, which has become a popular event with my private music students. These front porch concerts started out as a way for my buddy John and me to play gigs during The Age of The Virus, when nobody was open for live music. I realized that if I wanted to play in front of a live audience, I’d have to circumvent the hysteria and become the venue and talent.

SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2025

15 March 202514 March 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

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This past Thursday was the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, a major event for my music students each year. The Music Festival is an opportunity for students to perform solo and ensemble pieces for judges. The judges are typically doctoral students at the University of South Carolina School of Music, and they often give excellent, detailed feedback to students.

Students can earn one of three scores: a Gold/Superior/I; a Silver/Excellent/II; or a Bronze/Good/III. Even students who earn a Gold/Superior often get invaluable comments (in other words, not just things like, “That was amazing!” without further elaboration, although that does happen occasionally). While I stress to my students that our aim is to get a Gold on our performances, the real value lies in 1.) challenging ourselves as musicians in the first place and 2.) taking constructive feedback to heart so that we can improve as musicians.

I also make sure they know that simply playing at the Festival is a testament to their courage as performers, as it is very difficult to expose one’s self to criticism, even when that criticism is designed to help us improve. For me, signing up and working hard to prepare a solo is the most important victory; everything else is icing on the cake.

That said, I am very pleased to announce that both my Middle School and High School Instrumental Ensembles earned Golds for their performances. My Middle School Music Ensemble competed in the Large Instrumental Ensemble category, and played an arrangement I put together of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. The High School Music Ensembled competed in the Small Instrumental Ensemble category, performing the 1930s jazz standard “All of Me.”

In total, we took home twenty (20) Gold medals, five (5) Silver medals, and three (3) Bronze medals.

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Gig Day IX: TJC Spring Jam IV

24 May 202420 May 2024 The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s time for another front porch concert! This event—the TJC Spring Jam and Recital—will be the eighth Front Porch concert I’ve hosted (I think), and I’ve learned quite a bit from the others, including the last Spooktacular.

This year marks the fourth Spring Jam, which has become a popular event with my private music students. These front porch concerts started out as a way for my buddy John and me to play gigs during The Age of The Virus, when nobody was open for live music. I realized that if I wanted to play in front of a live audience, I’d have to circumvent the hysteria and become the venue and talent.

Gradually, the concept morphed from a self-indulgent concert into a recital for my private music students. The Lord Has Blessed me—far beyond what I deserve—with a large clientele of private music students (I’m a bit murky on the number at the moment, as I have several seniors graduating tomorrow, but it’s around fifteen lessons a week), so it made sense to offer a couple of recital opportunities a year for them.

SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2024

9 March 20248 March 2024 The Portly Politico3 Comments

That said, I am very pleased to announce that both my Middle School and High School Instrumental Ensembles earned Golds for their performances. The Middle School Music Ensemble performed an instrumental arrangement of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” from his opera Rigoletto (you can purchase sheet music of my now-award-winning arrangement here, here, and here). The High School Music Ensemble played the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.”

Our Choir Director had a great day, too: her choir earned a Gold, and each of her vocal soloists earned Gold as well.

Here is the (rather dry) update I sent to my administration after school, which I am sure they have blasted out onto social media by this point:

On Thursday, 7 March 2024, forty-two (42) student-musicians travelled to the SCISA Music Festival at the USC School of Music in Columbia, South Carolina to perform adjudicated solo and ensemble pieces. Students competed in the categories of Small Vocal Ensemble, Small Instrumental Ensemble, Large Instrumental Ensemble, Vocal Solo, Drum Solo, Piano Solo, Guitar Solo, and Violin Solo.

The Small Vocal Ensemble, the Small Middle School Instrumental Ensemble, and the Large High School Instrumental Ensemble all earned Gold (Superior) ratings.

Vocal soloists earned five (5) Gold ratings, two (2) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

Instrumental soloists earned eight (8) Gold ratings, three (3) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

In total, students gave twenty-three (23) musical performances, earning sixteen (16) Gold/Superior ratings, five (5) Silver/Excellent ratings, and two (2) Bronze/Good ratings.

The results demonstrate the musical talents of the [school’s] student body, and speak to the cultivation of those talents in the Music program.

So, what does it take to get such results? Let’s dive in.

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Memorable Monday III: Monday Steakhouse Blues

4 March 20243 March 2024 The Portly Politico5 Comments

Well, it seems that my resolve yesterday to get back to our regular schedule waivered, before breaking down completely. Yours portly has been exceptionally busy lately—March and April are always difficult, but this February was also quite brutal—and what little creative energy I have has been laser-focused on composing.

I also haven’t really watched any flicks worth reviewing. To be clear, I have reviewed plenty of bad movies. Lately, though, nothing has leapt out at me as worth hammering out 600-1000 words. Maybe Ponty will finally write that rebuttal to my award-winning, trenchant, insightful, powerful, persuasive review of Donnie Darko (1999).

So I thought I’d cast back to an old post about eating a steak alone on a Monday night while using my cellphone to write a blog post. I wrote the post on the eve of the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, which is one of the marquee events of our music program. It’s a huge and chaotic undertaking, but super fun, and I love seeing my students get ready to perform.

I’m pretty on-the-ball this year, but that on-the-ballitude accounts, in part, for my poor posting—I’ve been working ahead on school and Music Festival stuff.

There probably won’t be any steak tonight, but there might be Thursday after I get back from the Festival.

Regardless, here’s 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

Lazy Sunday CCVIII: Original Music, Part I

25 June 202321 June 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Ah, the glorious summer. I can already feel it slipping through my Vienna sausage fingers like the grains of sand in an hour glass, or the metaphorical sandbags I’m desperately stacking up against the inexorable tide of the new school year. I love teaching, but having mornings free to write and the like is glorious.

One perk of summer is that I can actually get out to open mic nights again. I’ve missed playing live, and I want to find sustainable ways to play during the school year. It’s difficult, though: I typically don’t get in from an open mic until 10 PM. That’s doable during the summer months, but during the school year, I’m usually zonked out by 9 or 9:30 PM, not hanging out with hipsters in some coffee shop.

Regardless, here are some recent posts featuring original pieces, two of which are open mic performances:

“Open Mic Adventures XXXIII: ‘Spore Song (Mushroom Dance)’” – I’d been wanting to compose a piece named “Spore Song” after reading Stacey C. Johnson‘s post “Spore Song” at her blog Breadcrumbs. I came up with this little instrumental piece, based on a derivation of the Db major pentatonic scale. I haven’t put this on YouTube yet, as I’d like to get better performances to upload there, but these two videos should capture the essential spirit of the piece.
“Open Mic Adventures XXXVI: ‘The Rings of Saturn’ LIVE!” – I’m not usually one to toot my horn (giggity), but this performance of “The Rings of Saturn” is pretty powerful. I didn’t realize what a good songwriter I was!
“Open Mic Adventures XXXVII: ‘Private Lessons (Goth Chick)’” – A less impressive performance, but this live rendition of “Private Lessons (Goth Chick)“—the cattiest song I’ve ever written—is still pretty fun (albeit an instance of poetic justice against its creator—d’oh!).

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Open Mic Adventures XXXVII: “Private Lessons (Goth Chick)”

20 June 202319 June 2023 The Portly Politico4 Comments

It’s good to be back at open mic—finally!—and I’m getting some of previously unreleased tunes posted to YouTube. One original tune I played last Tuesday, 13 June 2023 is a piece I wrote in 2018 about the open mic scene called “Private Lessons (Goth Chick)“—the cattiest song I’ve ever written.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Jam 2023 Review

3 June 20232 June 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Subscribers: the annual TPP Summer Reading List will be posted soon (sometime this month—maybe next weekend!). I’ll also be getting back to my series on Washington, D.C., this month as well.

Another Spring Jam is in the books, and I think it was the best one yet. I should probably write that behind the paywall, but I’d like everyone to know.

Regular readers will know that in October 2020 I launched the TJC Halloween Spooktacular (I’d done a “Spooktacular” at a coffee shop in 2019, but that was a very different event), a Halloween concert on my front porch. That first front porch Spooktacular featured two opening bands, followed by a couple of sets from my friend John and myself. It was a rousing success, but in retrospect, it was too long (three hours!) and needed some streamlining.

Of course, in The Age of The Virus, everyone was starving for live entertainment and social interaction after being cooped up inside with Netflix and takeout for (by that point) seven months, so I could get way with a bloated bill. It was a success, and most folks stuck around until we wrapped up sometime after 9 PM.

While I don’t think I’ve ever repeated the success of the first Spooktacular in terms of attendance and cashflow, I do think I’ve improved the formula somewhat.

The biggest change came when I made the Spooktacular and the spin-off Spring Jam into a recital for my private music students. Following the doldrums of Summer 2020, when I had just one piano student every week, my private lessons empire ballooned to around twenty lessons or so each week (occasionally fewer, often more). That has been a major financial and musical blessing, but it also means I have enough students to put on a pretty good recital, even if some students can’t attend.

With this latest Spring Jam, I think I have gotten it down to more of a science—but a fun science, like playing with magnets in the seventh grade. There’s still the fun, relaxed, DYI-spirit of the event, but everything seems to be running more smoothly.

Like playing an instrument, practice makes perfect.

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Open Mic Adventures XXXIV: “Chase’s Dilemma”

30 May 202323 May 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

In keeping with the vacation vibes of Memorial Day Weekend, it’s going to be a pretty short edition of Open Mic Adventures this week. The good news is that very soon I’ll be back to showcasing footage from actual open mics, and not just me noodling on the piano in my school’s tiny music room.

That said, I hastily recorded a video of a very basic piano piece I wrote for one of my students, whose name is Chase. It was a very quick sightreading exercise for him, and an opportunity for me to write some more student-focused material.

I suppose the “Dilemma” in the title refers to the presence of an F# accidental, as well as the necessity to move the right hand from C to D position and back again. The left hand is a simple ascending line with that playful F# tossed in the mix.

Gig Day VII: TJC Spring Jam III

26 May 202322 May 2023 The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s time for another front porch concert! This event—the TJC Spring Jam and Recital—will be the sixth Front Porch concert I’ve hosted (I think), and I’ve learned quite a bit from the others, including the last Spooktacular.

This year marks the third Spring Jam, which has become a popular event with my private music students. These front porch concerts started out as a way for my buddy John and me to play gigs during The Age of The Virus, when nobody was open for live music. I realized that if I wanted to play in front of a live audience, I’d have to circumvent the hysteria and become the venue and talent.

Gradually, the concept morphed from a self-indulgent concert into a recital for my private music students. The Lord has really blessed me—far beyond what I deserve—with a large clientele of private music students (around twenty-two at the time of writing, working out in practice to anywhere from twenty-to-twenty-four lessons a week), so it made sense to offer a couple of recital opportunities a year for them.

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: private lessons